I recently put together my friends computer with an AMD 64 3500+ socket 939 (2.2GHz) with a Geforce 6800GT. He is complaining becuse it is only 2.2GHz which was less than his old P4 533MHz FSB 2.6Ghz cpu. How can I explain to a person who doesn't know anything about cpu's and their architecture that AMD's even though they have lower clock speeds work just as well as Intel's with a higher clock speed? I've told him over and over that the AMD 3500+ is made to compete with the P4 3.6 or 3.4GHz but he still does not believe me, he thinks I bought him an old crappy cpu for 280$. Help Please!!!

Explain to him about AMD's 3500+. That number is to show Intel people how the AMD compares to other cpu's. So his AMD easily compares, if not beats, a 3.5 GHz processor. Need further explanation? We totally need an AMD fanboy up in here to explain it a little better.

When you break down all CPUs to the most basic elements, every CPU processes instructions.

You have to take other architectural elements into account besides raw frequency such as multi-cycle, pipelining, and superscaling. At this point, design of processors diverge. A manufacterer (Intel) can choose to create their processor in order to process fewer instructions per clock cycle (on average) in exchange for having more clock cycles (and higher megahertz) a second whereas a second manufacturer (AMD) can choose to create their processor so it will process more instructions per cycle (on average) in exchange for fewer cycles (and lower megahertz) a second.

In order to summarize it as 'noobish' as I can, AMD uses shorter pipelines than Intel, therefore their instructions are processed faster and more efficently because data isn't stretched out as much from point A to point B. Therefore, the CPU doesn't have to perform as many clock cycles to obtain the same speed as a longer pipelined core.

I just quoted this analogy off of the Alienware website. Just use their analogy.

The AMD processor, for example, uses a lower clock rate and cache level than the Intel processor, but its overall performance is compensated by their well-designed CPU architecture and resource administration. To put this as an analogy, imagine two cars that need to get to a certain destination. One of the cars is much faster than the other (Intel), but the driver in the second car (AMD) knows all of the shortcuts, allowing him to arrive at the same destination and at the same time than the faster car, and also uses less gas (resources) to get there. Even though this seems to give AMD the advantage, please note that Intel uses more of its resources for failsafe purposes, which guarantee that the data that it processes is accurate.